Mile
Zero

April 2, 2007

They say you can't appreciate some bands until you see them live. It's
news to me. But from the Black Keys website, I found Fab Channel, which
has collected an alarming number of live concerts in full, including the
Keys:

You might also be interested in a few other shows they've got there:

Bloc Party - I've
always liked "This Modern Love" since I heard Final Fantasy cover it,
although I could pretty much take or leave everything else.

March 29, 2007

Rad Monkey Cowbells has
the cure for what ails you. Not only do they offer the first ever electric
cowbell, but they've got a preview up for the VLC800, which uses digital
modeling to emulate 12 classic cowbell sounds. If only Gene Frenkle had
lived to see this day.

(Yes, it is a joke. The same people created the Sonicfinger plugins, including
"Virtual Studio Visitor" and the "Dead Quietenator.")

March 25, 2007

The problem with judging the Variax bass is that it really needs to be put
into a live or recording context for a real evaluation. For one thing, the
differences between the modeled instruments are often not entirely
apparent at low volumes, so you need to be able to turn up the volume.
Also, like all instruments, it sounds different in a band context, and
that's really where the models come into their own. When solo'd, they tend
to sound very similar, because at heart all basses are still just
vibrating metal strings bolted to wood. But with other instruments, the
individual attributes of the modeled basses start to come through--the
bounce and snap of the Stingray's preamp, for example, or the thick boom
of the T-Bird's humbuckers. At the very least, you need to hear these
basses with drums. So to get a bit more of that perspective, I took the
Variax to one of my band auditions this weekend. I don't think the band is
likely to work out, but I'm happy with how the bass sounded.

The space itself was a small practice room, which tended to accentuate the
treble a bit. On most active basses, you'd want to turn down the highs,
and you can do that with the Variax on both passive and active models.
Unfortunately, when you change models, the knobs reset to their saved
positions. So the first performance lesson is that room-tuning has to be
done from the amplifier--probably the best place to do it anyway.

The band concept this audition was a kind of funk/hip-hop/rock fusion, and
the tracks I played with had lots of synth pads and samples already worked
into them. The bandleader said he was interested in the kinds of
extended-range bass that I do, but that kind of music (Tupac meets Prince,
in his words) really calls for an old-school thump from the bass. I used
the Thunderbird and the P-bass models for the most part, and was
pleasantly surprised by them. I'm not entirely sure if they're accurate
models, but they're both good bass sounds. They've got plenty of impact,
and they cut through the mix to support it without really stepping out in
front.

In fact, that tends to be what I find most interesting about the Variax so
far, and also what I find disturbing. When my main axe was the All Star,
which is a J-bass clone, I learned a set of techniques for getting
different sounds on it: variations on where to pluck the strings, the
interactions between the pickups, and the tone knob. I had to learn those,
because a passive instrument doesn't really have much in the way of
tone-shaping. On an active instrument, you have an EQ built in, which adds
a new layer of versatility. The Variax actually models both the passive
and active tone circuits of its basses, but I found myself using the
models themselves as tone presets instead of spending much time with the
treble and bass controls. Until I get to know them all better, that's
probably how it's going to go: I've basically got about 10 new basses to
learn, after it took me three years to really feel like I was wringing
good stuff out of a single instrument.

We also played some of my own stuff, which is... interesting... when
adding a drummer and guitarist. The Rickenbacker has rapidly become one of
my favorite sounds on the Variax, and it sounded the way I thought it
should. There's definitely some of that piano-ringing clarity to the sound
that I would expect from a Rick. I also flipped back to my J preset, which
solos the neck pickup, and got pretty much exactly what I'm used to,
although it seems a little stiffer than the All-Star. It's so hard to do
precise comparisons of these things, especially since they're not modeling
my instruments (although that would be a nice touch), but a set of
vintage basses that I've never touched.

Overall, it was a pleasant experience. The Variax never felt
digital or artificial, although I didn't expect it to. I did find that the
synth sounds, using my presets, came across as thin and weak, although
with a little tweaking they started to stand out a bit more. But the bass
sounds are solid, and they really do start to distinguish themselves a bit
more in context. I don't think it's a good first instrument, because I
think musicians need to learn (as I did) on something that makes them work
a little harder and develop their technique to compensate for any
limitations of the hardware. The Variax doesn't replace a great
instrument, either--now that I've heard the model, I'm even more
interested in a real Rickenbacker. But it does replace the instruments
that players can't afford, or wouldn't play enough to justify buying. And
it's definitely got value as a workhorse for people who only want to carry
one bass, or who want to experiment with different tones.

March 22, 2007

I think I missed this the first time that CDM posted it, but
Audiohead.net's tour of
NIN's recording space is very, very cool. I listened to The
Fragile again this weekend from start to finish while walking the dog,
something I hadn't done since Tony Scott's hideous Man On Fire
almost ruined it for me. The change from that sound to the more
stripped-down aesthetic of With Teeth is striking, and Reznor's
studio setup sounds like it lent itself to that process. Also: lots of
gear pictures. What I would give for just one of those racks.

March 19, 2007

This documentary of creating the Doctor Who theme is very cool. It shows
how the music was assembled, piece by piece, using just analog
synthesizers and a tape machine. What I love about modern recording,
though, is that you can pack all the equipment required for the same kind
of work into a laptop and a MIDI keyboard. When I write music for work, I
do it almost exactly the same way, but it's all in software now.

March 5, 2007

As a follow-up to my earlier post on how music companies should be selling
(and we should be listening to) higher resolution, uncompressed
recordings, CDM
recently mentioned Korg's brand-new one-bit recorders. It sounds
silly, but basically instead of running a set of filters to get a full
multi-byte description of the waveform's state, these sample the waveform
millions of times a second, checking only to see if it has gone up or
down. The advantage is that they don't require filtering for noise that
results from the Nyquist theory, which states that sampling may produce
sine-wave artifacts at frequencies higher than 1/2 the sampling rate (thus
the reason that CDs are set at 44.1KHz rates, which is slightly more than
twice the 22KHz boundary of most human hearing). Instead, a one-bit
digital-analog conversion is turned straight into voltage changes, for
a theoretically cleaner sound--although they are vulnerable to
extremely high frequency noise, well past the limits of perception but
enough to mess with some older equipment.

Korg has a nice intro paper online
to explain this in a little more detail, and to give context: they're
basically selling these recorders as ways to hold onto mastered content in
a completely lossless format. Sound on Sound reviewed
the units in this month's issue, and they were impressed with them,
although the mic preamps are apparently weak. I'm also unclear on
why they're selling one of these in an iPod-style form factor, but I'm
strangely tempted by them. Apparently you can get a whole 22 minutes of
incredibly faithful audio per gigabyte of storage with one of these. I
feel more exclusive just thinking about it.

Wired's music writer asks
the obvious question: if we've got increasing amounts of storage
nowadays on our music devices (even the flash drives are multi-gig now,
whatistheworldcomingto...), why are we still buying compressed music? Why
aren't we listening to the 24-bit, high sample-rate masters that came out
of the studio?

Because honestly: an 80-gig iPod full of .mp3 files will still be playing
when the sun explodes and flash-fries the Earth into a crispy,
carbon-based donut-hole. And yet you hear about people who are proud of
this. "I've got 70,000 hours of music on my MP3 player," they'll say, and
any relatively-sane listener should be asking, "Why? When will you listen
to it? How much of it have you actually heard?"

And perhaps more importantly, given the length of those playlists, how
much time do you spend fiddling with the scroll wheel instead of doing
something productive, like digging your own grave?

My steady complaint about production trends has been the constant
prioritization of "more music" over "quality of sound." It certainly
started with the use of brick-wall limiting to create "loud" albums for CD
and radio play, but it only got worse when digital compression started
stripping frequencies out of the material, just because flash memory was
small and expensive. Now that we have all of this
disk space available, why can't we use it to listen to better-than-CD
quality, instead of jamming it full of inferior noise?

And then people can ruin that high-quality music through a set of $3
Apple earbuds. But at least then I'll have something else to yell about.

February 28, 2007

I like it. But then, I like just about anything for three days or so. I've
made an .mp3 of a few of
the better models, complete with rambling narration. The executive
summary is that the jazz bass sounds are pretty good, the Stingray's not
bad, the 12-string is better than the 8-string, the acoustics are
believable, and I really love the synthesizers. There are a few that I can
see being useful--the Alembic is a good sound, but I've never even been
near an Alembic, so I couldn't say if it's accurate. I think the weakest
models are the flatwounds, the Hofner, and the Gibson EB-3, but the worst
of all is the Jaco fretless imitation.

February 27, 2007

I just got a friend request from someone who makes vegan guitar straps.
Well, technically I was befriended by the vegan guitar strap
itself. "I am a very vegan guitar strap," says the description,
concluding with "I am cruelty free, I am sweathsop [sic] free, but, most
importantly, I rock harder than the strap your brother got you at Guitar
Center."

I am not sure I am ready to be friends with inanimate objects, much less
ones that are proud of their cruelty-free status. Most of my human friends
are not cruelty-free, even just in the interpersonal sense of the word.
But I approved the request anyway, because you never know when that kind
of thing might come in handy.